Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

by Kelly McDaniel

Even if you understand that your mother’s cruelty wasn’t purposeful, the pain she caused you is real, it’s deep, and it needs repair.

As a result, your relationship with yourself and others is devastated.

Surviving a dangerous mother is an unspeakable trauma that is difficult to recognize. Perhaps we cannot see it because deep inside each of us is a little person who remembers the vulnerability of being totally dependent, and the idea that a mother could betray this dependency is terrifying. It strikes a primitive fear in our mammal brain. The helplessness and devastation of life with Third-Degree Mother Hunger is why I believe having a dangerous, frightening mother is the worst childhood adversity of all.

But when a mother is the source of fear, her love is the traumatic event. And there is no way to make sense of this. Danger fuses with love. Instincts for self-preservation surrender to the overarching need for bonding, creating what’s known as a betrayal bond with the mother. When a mother’s love is threatening, your body remembers the pain at a molecular level. An abusive mother generates traumatic stress, because your coping capacity becomes overwhelmed and you are too young to protect yourself. Since a mother’s love is your primary defense from adversity, when she is the threat, her care is a profound relational betrayal. To bond with an unkind mother, our merciful imagination works overtime to create a different mother from the one we have. We create one who loves us, one who is taking care of us, one who isn’t betraying our vulnerability. Our brain designs a different mother to help us cope with constant fear. Sadly, in service to bonding, these necessary brain changes create long-term personality problems. Surviving Third-Degree Mother Hunger may have left you with automatic dissociative patterns, chronic shame, and the propensity to land in relationships with others who betray you. Acknowledging Abuse Describing an abusive mother is not easy. We don’t like to think of mothers who hurt their children. The idea is so abhorrent that our collective denial protects us from the knowledge that it happens. Periodically, we read tragedies of maternal neglect in the news or ...

Emotionally abusive mothers rarely repair the hurt they cause, and the lack of acknowledgment is what causes an enduring psychological trauma.

But emotional abuse is psychologically traumatic because it betrays a fundamental role of parenting: it violates trust.

Missing an emotional safety net, the developing young brain focuses on finding safety elsewhere instead of playing, relaxing, or bonding with others. In this way, an emotionally abusive mother distorts her daughter’s inner life, creating personality adaptations that may bring on future trouble. For example, girls with abusive mothers have difficulty making friends. They

struggle to trust. Prolonged

Sometimes cold and brittle, other times childlike and docile, women with Third-Degree Mother Hunger have frozen, fractured emotional development. This

The research suggests that parents who spank their children are actually unable to regulate their own emotions.

Spanking creates toxic stress for a child and for the siblings who watch, eroding trust and safety in a family.14 Children who were spanked suffer long-term symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, and emotional distress.15

And more than the abuse itself, women mourn the fact that no one protected them.

Mothers who turn the other way when their boyfriends, their husbands, or their own parents sexually violate their daughters are part of the abuse.

Since a mother is our first intimate partner and she has access to our body at all times, her cruelty is a form of domestic violence. If she handles us aggressively or directs her rage at us, we experience unimaginable terror. Carrying symptoms like the victims of intimate partner violence, we struggle to make friends or find a place to belong. We feel inherently bad. Almost unanimously, victims of partner violence believe domestic

abuse is their fault. Daughters of abusive mothers do too.

Dissociation becomes a way to hide from intolerable things that are happening,

Dissociating might feel like tunnel vision, a hazy sense of time, a tingling in the ears, or a dreamlike sense of being someone else or somewhere else. One

Third-Degree Mother Hunger comes from relational fear without relational repair.

During our formative years, fear without repair creates lifelong changes in the brain.

Herein lies the essence of complex trauma. When a mother can’t acknowledge, apologize for, and amend her harm, fear changes a child’s brain functions, leaving her with a blurred se...

Dissociating protected you when you needed it, but the habit makes past events difficult to recall. Rest assu...

For those of you interested in the brain, you may already know how stress impacts the temporal lobe—specifically the amygdala and hippocampus. Stress irritates the functioning of the amygdala, where empathy develops.33 Cortisol poisons the hippocampus, which makes sense of incoming data and memory processing. The brain is adapting, keeping the necessary biological processes going, like our heartbeat and breathing, but filtering out less critical processes, like memory and empathy. During a stressful event or moment, the brain literally ignores information secondary to survival. Over time, unused brain neurons and synaptic connections disappear. Scientists call this sophisticated neurological process pruning.34

Since you are adapted to danger, situations that would frighten a regular person don’t raise a red flag for you. You know how to bond with others who may betray you. You might even be bored by people who don’t.

Toxic shame makes you question your right to be here. Toxic shame mires your soul in a tar pit of insecurity.

Toxic shame is an inherited type of shame that

has nothing to do with you.

You could be carrying shame that belongs to your mother, like the shame she didn’t fee...

Sometimes toxic shame masquerades as pseudo confidence or an inflated sense of superiority: a cover-up for feeling awful. You feel pathetic but certainly don’t want anyone to know, so you’re quick to judge others before they judge you.

And it usually sounds like your mother.

But remember: Your personality developed to survive your mother’s lack of care. It’s not your true self.

You are building secure attachment within yourself that was lost in your formative years. You are creating an internal home where you are safe and loved.

Blocking pain is the brain’s compassionate response to trauma; it compartmentalizes the memory. But it also makes life colorless and dull, and feeling authentic joy or finding meaning is a struggle.

the power imbalance between you and a helping professional reminds your unconscious of the fear that if someone really knows you, they can manipulate and control you. For these reasons, it’s essential to find a therapist who understands attachment theory and who can gently pace your healing process.

While this goes faster when you have healthy relationships around you, new inner security can also grow from your own efforts.

Although there isn’t a magic formula for healing Mother Hunger, identifying how you feel can direct how or where to start. How

A qualified attachment-focused therapist

a therapist who is trauma informed is critical.

You are designed to heal from illness and injury, but until you pinpoint the issue, the brain isn’t sure exactly what to do.

You might also be confused because missing maternal elements are deeply buried beneath protective amnesia. You may wonder, What did I miss? If you aren’t sure, this is a good time to get support. Your missing needs are waiting for attention, but since early maternal messages are imprinted before language or explicit memory, they are harder to find than others. A trauma-trained somatic therapist can be incredibly helpful in uncovering these lost treasures.

here, he might encourage you to have a therapist anyway, because “the therapist’s role is analogous to that of a mother who provides her child with a secure base from which to explore the world.”

Think back to your earliest memories with your mother. Was she affectionate with you? Could you rely on her when you were afraid? Do you think she was happy? Did she inspire you? Learning your story puts you in touch with the missing pieces so you can put them back together.

With a story that explains your behavior and your feelings, energy for new decisions, dreams, and goals appears. Renewed focus is a sign that your attachment style is healing.

Healing happens by knowing what you didn’t have so you can fill your empty spirit wi...

We simply can’t change what we don’t know. Knowing happens in two ways: cogni...

But to create lasting change, you must feel the wound—

Mother Hunger is a right brain wound.

Through the nonverbal interactions that happen with a competent, well-trained clinician, the right brain heals from “the music, not the words, of what passes between people.”

because the relational wound is receiving relational care.

Practice restorative yoga to ease emotional wounds stuck in your body.

Earning secure attachment means making your life as safe as possible so that you can reset your baseline.